The SF Mayoral Race: Michela Alioto-Pier

San Francisco’s mayoral election is coming up in a few weeks, and it’s an interesting race for several reasons: It’s a remarkably crowded field with 16 candidates, and voters will choose not just one, but their top three, in the new ranked choice voting system. And that means more than a few have a chance.

The presumed front-runner is an interim mayor who has never actually held elected office. And one of the contenders is a former city supervisor whose grandfather once ran San Francisco himself. Michela Alioto-Pier joined KALW’s Ben Trefny in the studio to discuss her legacy and her hopes for San Francisco.

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BEN TREFNY: Michela, tell me about where you live in the city.

MICHELA ALIOTO-PIER: I live in the Cow Hollow neighborhood of San Francisco and I love it because it is full of children and seniors and families, and we’re in walking distance to a lot of wonderful places like Union Street and Chestnut Street, the Marina Greens, a lot of public libraries in our neighborhood, the newly renovated Rockefeller one on Octavia, and our small little neighborhood one Park Allen. So, it’s a wonderful neighborhood to live in.

TREFNY: It’s a city that has a very low population of children compared to other cities of comparable size. So, what do you see different about Cow Hollow compared to the rest of the city, or do you think that reputation is justified?

ALIOTO-PIER: Well, it’s interesting, and you are absolutely right. San Francisco has fewer children per capita than any other city in the nation – the entire United States. Our problem, truthfully, is that when these kids hit the age of five, that’s when we see our families leaving these neighborhoods as well.

TREFNY: So what do you do to change that?

ALIOTO-PIER: Well, I think a lot of it has to do with our schools. I know for certain areas in the Bayview and District 10 and out in the Richmond, particularly with our Asian American families, the issue of neighborhood schools is one of the most important ones as well.

TREFNY: So there’s a new method of determining what school you’re going to go to and it’s more neighborhood-weighted but still, there are only so many schools that people really clamor to get into. So, how do we change this? It seems almost like an impossible situation.

ALIOTO-PIER: It does. It certainly is not an easy task and I wouldn’t want people to believe that I thought that it was, but I will say that in the city we still have 72% of families who’d like to send their kids to neighborhood schools. The real question here is one of choice. You should feel like you have more control over where your kids go.

One thing you also see in San Francisco is that we have more kids than other [places in the] nation in the private school system. Families who could possibly invest in our public schools, who have the resources to invest in our public schools – they don’t get the choice of school that they want and so they pick privates over the publics. And, in some cases if some of those families were given public school choices they would be able to invest in our public schools privately, and we would be able to take the money from the school system and redirect that into the schools of greater need, which is something that we should be looking at and we don’t.

TREFNY: So kind of a revenue-sharing program.

ALIOTO-PIER: Yes.

TREFNY: You were a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. You were initially appointed by former Mayor Gavin Newsome, and you were re-elected twice. What did you learn about city politics while in that role and how the city runs?

ALIOTO-PIER: I learned a lot about city politics as a member of the Board. I learned that for starters, going back to good old Tip O’Neill, our former Speaker of the House, all politics is local and I think that nothing is truer here in San Francisco. When you sit on the Board – and there are 11 members of the Board – and you spend time and energy on drafting legislation that you think is going to help San Francisco and you bring it forward and can’t count to six and can’t get those six votes to pass it, it can be a pretty discouraging event.

And, so you learn very quickly that you befriend your colleagues and you come up with ideas and suggestions that bring people together and as crazy as the Board of Supervisors was when I sat on it and as contentious as it was, we got a lot of things accomplished. You do learn that some it is show but behind that show there was a lot of effective stuff that went on.

TREFNY: I want to do a quick word association with you. Are you ready?

ALIOTO-PIER: I’m ready.

TREFNY: Litter.

ALIOTO-PIER: Pick it up.

TREFNY: Do you think that you could institute a policy like that if you were mayor?

ALIOTO-PIER: Picking up the litter?

TREFNY: Yeah. It doesn’t happen.

ALIOTO-PIER: No. It doesn’t. I think that we need more public awareness of it. It’s amazing to me how dirty the streets of San Francisco have become over the last 10 years. But, I would absolutely make it one of my priorities. I grew up in what I remember being a very clean city and it doesn’t feel that way right now.

TREFNY: Muni.

ALIOTO-PIER: Muni. Not particularly accessible.

TREFNY: Mid-Market redevelopment.

ALIOTO-PIER: On its way up.

TREFNY: Bayview Hunters Point redevelopment.

ALIOTO-PIER: Uh … a lot of potential.

TREFNY: The America’s Cup coming to San Francisco.

ALIOTO-PIER: Very exciting.

TREFNY: Gentrification.

ALIOTO-PIER: We have to be very careful the way we use the word “gentrification.”

TREFNY: How do you mean?

ALIOTO-PIER: We had an issue a few years ago where we wanted to plant trees in the Tenderloin and at the time a supervisor refused to allow for the planting of trees in the Tenderloin, claiming that that would gentrify the neighborhood. We have to be careful that we don’t use excuses to stop growth.

We don’t want certain areas to be gentrified but we do need to be able to have all communities to have trees and we do need all our communities to be able to have clean streets and no graffiti on the walls and look like happy, beautiful places to be. And just because a place gets cleaned up doesn’t mean it’s going to be gentrified.

TREFNY: So why should you be mayor of San Francisco?

ALIOTO-PIER: Oh, where to begin? (laughs)

TREFNY: Give me a one-minute pitch,.

ALIOTO-PIER: You know, I am the only candidate in this race who was born and raised on these streets. I know what they were like in the ‘70s and in the ‘80s. I know what our history was, but I also know what our future can be. We were a maritime city; we should be a maritime city again. As a member of the Board of Supervisors I created San Francisco’s first economic plan which is a blueprint to job creation. There are so many possibilities: microloans and helping our small businesses get on their feet.

Oh, and one other thing, I am a mom and I am a woman. And we have had 43 mayors in this beautiful city. We have had one woman and she was appointed first and then was reelected: Diane Feinstein. And I am raising my kids here like any other family.

I have a 10-year-old, an eight-year-old, and a five-year old. And, I am the first one to say that my life is a juggling act.

But, I am also the first one to tell you that women’s issues, as a member of the Board of Supervisors, were not paid close enough attention to. Every time I had something up at the Board it was always a fight. It would be nice if women had better representation in this city and if our families were given the longer end of that stick.